Hot search keywords

Zhejiang Higher People’s Court: We Adopt An Open and Neutral Stance on Blockchain-Based Electronic Evidence

Although China is tightening its grip on cryptocurrencies and ICOs, the country’s authorities continue to embrace blockchain and put it into practice.

Wang Yifei , associate chief justice of the intellectual property tribunal of the Zhejiang provincial higher people’s court, again emphasized on Thursday that courts in Zhejiang will continue to adopt an open and neutral stance on using blockchain technology to analyze individual cases in a comment of a recent copyright dispute judgement in Hangzhou, the capital of China’s eastern Zhejiang province, according to state-run people.cn.

The Hangzhou Internet Court has become the country’s first to accept electronic evidence authenticated with blockchain technology in a copyright infringement case in late June. The plaintiff conducted an automatic capture of the infringing website and the source code through a third-party evidence preservation platform, before hashing the web content along with logs and uploading them to Bitcoin and Factom blockchains.

And the court decided that blockchain-based electronic evidence is sufficient to be legally accepted. Therefore, the judge ruled in favor of the plaintiff.

Wang said at the Thursday’s symposium that there are three reasons why the Internet Court accepted the blockchain-based electronic evidence: the qualification of the third-party evidence preservation platform , the reliable technical means that is used to obtain the evidence of the infringing webpage, and the completeness of data. Wang added that the court focused on reviewing the completeness and accuracy of the electronic evidence in this case.

In summary, Wang indicated the courts will continue to adopt an open and neutral attitude on the cases involving blockchain technology. “ We (the court) will not exclude or impose higher standards simply because it involves new technologies such as blockchain. Nor can we lower the standards just because blockchain is tamper-proof and immutable. We will determine on a case-by-case basis.” Wang said.